


Remembrance

by iuwui (orphan_account)



Category: NCT
Genre: Angst, Existential Crisis, Fluff, Heaters, M/M, Mars, Ocean, Please read, So much angst, because I sure cant, bitch lasagna, black - Freeform, haha just joking, i actually cried, im cry, im in public using free WiFi, johnten, just like the mc, love y’all no homo, nct - Freeform, on, one - Freeform, or shit, shit works too, shot, someone you loved, sounds self absorbed but i swear it was the music, thank you for str34ming boom, tiny little ten aliens, try to find symbolism, what is life anhmore, why has my life come to writing NCT fanfics, why was I squatting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-09-25 23:16:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20379751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/iuwui
Summary: It’s funny, the way the world works.





	Remembrance

**Author's Note:**

> "Visions of Gideon" my (read: hypegirl's) recommendation for this fic.
> 
> 05-09-2020: OH MY GOD WHO LET ME TAG THIS THING 💔

It’s funny, the way the world works.

One day someone you take for granted, someone that’s always been there for you, someone you rely on, who you tell your secrets and hopes and dreams and fears, the person who you run to when you’re hurting, is torn away from you, leaving your heart gaping and wide open.

Ten stares at the ocean, standing on the dock, elevated thirty, forty feet. It would be so easy. 

_So. Goddamned. Easy._

Just to jump.

To let go.

To give up.

Johnny would be furious, but then again, Johnny left him first.

Ten lets out a sob, a small, broken thing, one that barely reached his throat and is lost in the night. It hurts, having to stay strong. It hurts so badly, and his head is overflowing with words of comfort from everyone. They blend into a blur, nameless faces and faceless names, and numbness, and he can’t remember any of them. He can only remember Johnny.

_“Heaven is a better place with him,” the pastor had consoled. _

Like Ten believed the religious bullshit. He’d been to church three times, and all were because of Johnny.

A tear leaks out, and it unleashes an entire week of pain and misery and self-loathing and disgust and anger at everyone, at himself, but mostly at Johnny.

_Why. Why did you leave me?! Why aren’t you here right now? You should be here. I need you right now. I’m cold._

_I’m so, so cold._

Ten cries, his false strength taking its toll, after people have left him behind. Tears pour down his face, silently falling into the ocean below.

He breathes. Gasps, raggedly and irregularly, gulping the air, taking each breath like it’s his last, because maybe it is.

And he  _remembers_.

_Johnny walking through the door, ducking a little because he was going to hit his head. Straightening up too soon, and bonking his head on the frame, anyways._

_Johnny blushing, as he told Ten he liked him. His face when Ten confessed his attraction right back, the his classic expression of surprise._

_Johnny laughing, and tickling Ten after a particularly bad day, telling stupid jokes and singing along to his radio._

_Hands outside of moving cars, and salty breezes, and warm tea, and messy hair, and soft sweaters and cuddles, and kissing away the tears one by one, and chocolate chip cookies, eaten too hot, when the cookie was still soft and you burned your tongue._

_He liked being the little spoon, even with the five inch height difference._

_Johnny, alive and obnoxious, right next to Ten._

_“We’ve been dating for three days. Chittaphon’s too... I don’t know, stuffy-“ here Ten protested “-and it’s nothing like you. You need a nickname.”_

_After brainstorming for a solid hour, Johnny had stormed into Ten’s apartment, all proud of himself. He bonked his head into the doorframe again, and cursed._

_“Ten.”_

_“Ten? Why Ten?”_

_“Because you’re a ten out of ten to me,” Johnny had replied, smiling in that way where the right corner was ever-so-slightly raised higher, a little crooked quirk. A special smile that only Ten saw._

_With that, Ten had fallen in love. _

_That was their first kiss, actually, with Ten launching himself at Johnny, and Johnny staggering a little before catching him._

_Then they moved in together._

_Three years, eight months, and some-amount-of-days that Ten has yet to count up, because that would make their time together just another number._

_Oil splashing onto Johnny’s hand, burning him. Ten freaking out. “It’s not the end of the world, silly.”_

_Bleeding left knuckles, after he punched someone who called Johnny a faggot. _

_“You absolute idiot,” Johnny had said, cleaning out Ten’s wounds with rubbing alcohol, and sighing as Ten jumped a little every time, refusing to let out a sound. “Just let others say it, don’t try and challenge everyone who insults me. Violence isn’t the answer, Chittaphon.”_

_To which Ten responded, “It is an easy solution.”_

_Ten talking about his childhood tormentors, ones that called him names, excluded him, stole his food, and money, ones that destroyed his homework, books, drawings, whatever, ripping it into shreds, and beat him up, just because he wasn’t afraid of being different. _

_Almost killing himself over it, but the knot he tied was too loose, and he slipped out, landing on the floor and breaking his arm. _

_When his parents had taken him to the hospital, they found out about his bruises, and he lied. _

_Coming out when he turned eighteen, and subsequently being disowned. The disgust on his father’s face, the hurt on his mother’s, the confusion of his little sister. _

_Crying silently into Johnny’s shirt, _ _and Johnny hugging him tight. “I’ll never let you go, okay?”_

_On the roof of their apartment, picnic blanket underneath them. Staring at the stars, the heavens surrounding them, and the city below, occasional honk punctuating the song of the city, low and humming and in their bones. _

_“Look, that one! That one’s us,” Johnny exclaimed, pointing at one star that was brighter than the rest._

_“That one’s Mars,” Ten had corrected._

_“No wonder you’re so weird. My tiny alien.”_

_Huddled under the covers, after their heater broke in the middle of January and they couldn’t scrape together the money to fix it- not that many were willing to do it, either, because being gay was apparently a disgusting disease. _

_“I want to open a dance studio,” Ten had confessed, teeth chattering._

_“You’ll do that,” Johnny reassured. “And I’ll be there at every performance.”_

_“Why would- I-" Ten shivered, and stopped speaking._

_“Shh, save your strength.” Johnny pulled Ten even closer, and they fell asleep like that._

_They talked about marriage, once or twice. “I’m marrying you as soon as it’s legal,” Johnny had stated, flipping over another pancake._

_“I’m not calling you my husband.”_

_“How about house spouse?” Johnny suggested, before breaking into another of his wide grins._

_Ten had whacked his head and laughed, too. “Oh my god, your jokes are awful.”_

_“You still love me.”_

_“Oh, shut up.” Ten poured maple syrup into Johnny’s hair, and then marriage was the least of their problems._

_That conversation was forgotten, much as joking breakfast discussions are._

_Day after day, one by one, where they fell a little more for each other._

_Johnny secretly loved romantic dramas. He cried every time he watched “Titanic”. Ten never let him hear the end of it._

_Ten didn’t like fruit. Johnny gasped in horror and didn’t talk to him for a solid two hours, before solemnly decreeing that the apartment was “henceforth the land of vegetables”._

_Each of the small discoveries drew them closer to each other._

_Secrets that were a little terrifying. _

_Cancer ran in Ten’s family. _

_Johnny accidentally killed the class fish._

_Every day a new day, a new chance to fall in love._

_Johnny gave Ten a ring, one he carved himself. It was wood, but intricate loops and swirls linked together to make it a piece of art. _

_The inside had the words, “Love, Johnny,” engraved into the band._

_Ten never took it off._

_Then, the phone call. “Is this Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul?”_

_“Ten,” he had automatically corrected. Another telemarketer, probably. “Is my pizza ready?”_

_“Uhhh... no. You’re listed as the emergency contact for John Jun Suh?”_

_“What happened?!” Ten asked, biting his tongue._

_“He apparently wasn’t feeling well today, and then he collapsed. He’s awake now, and says he’s fine. He’s asking for you.”_

_And Ten had frantically called his friend, Kun, because he didn’t have his own car. _

_When Kun has arrived, he had been so confused. _

_“Ten, what-"_

_“Johnny. Hospital. Now.”_

_When Ten had sprinted in the hospital, up the stairs to Johnny, breathing hard as he staggered into the room. One doctor looked at him with pity. “He’s got stage three cancer.”_

_“Can’t he recover?”_

_Not his Johnny. Not his idiot._

_“No. There’s no known cure. He has anywhere from three months to a year.”_

_Ten stood stock-still._

_“So... he’s going to die?”_

_The doctor nodded._

_Silence._

_Kun asked the doctor to leave, noting his friend’s apparent muteness._

_The doctor left, his footsteps the traveling down the hall, further and further away._

_“Ten, I’m so, so, sorry.”_

_Ten straightened up to his full 5’7”._

_“What’s there to be sorry about? Johnny can beat it. Johnny will beat it. The doctor’s being stupid.”_

_Kun sighed, and replied, “It’ll be okay, Ten. I’m here.”_

_“No- I- I’m talking to Johnny.”_

_He sat next to Johnny’s bed, squeezing his hand._

_Johnny squeezed back, lifting himself up. _

_“Hey,” Ten started, feeling small and insignificant. “How are you feeling?”_

_“I’ve had worse,” Johnny smiled weakly, head falling back onto his pillow. “Ironic how I have the cancer, when it runs in your family.”_

_He grinned self-deprecatingly and flashed a thumbs up. "Functioning at a full battery level."_

_“Do you want to try the chemo?”_

_“What’s the point?” Johnny replied. “It’s a waste of money we don’t have. We both know very well I’d die-” he stopped, a vacant stare spreading across his face._

_He was going to die._

_“You’re staying home, then.”_

_“I-I’m working until I can’t anymore.”_

_He had to stay home after another two months, but Johnny held his head high. _

_When his right hand lost all feeling and he couldn’t cook anymore, he’d sit on a swivel chair and point Ten around the kitchen. _

_His legs lost mobility, and they had to borrow a wheelchair from a friend. _

** _He stayed strong. _ **

_When he couldn’t wheel himself around, and had become a shell of the old Johnny, he kept going. _

_He planned his funeral, down to the smallest detail. “You better be getting me a nice bouquet.” He chose the music he wanted. “And I swear, if that pastor starts talking about how I was lost too young, or whatever, you boo him off the stage.” _

_Ten had laughed shakily at that. _

_He was there, when Johnny stopped. _

_When he drew his last breath. _

_“I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I love you.”_

_And Ten wept silently, until his tear ducts dried out and he composed himself enough to call the funeral home._

_The funeral music was soulful and crushing, with people crying left and right. Ten excused himself to the bathroom to laugh maniacally when the organist played “The Sound of Silence remixed with B*tch Lasagna”. The look on Johnny’s grandma’s face was the highlight of his day._

_The following week of numbness felt like he was moving through the world in a drugged state. _

_His friends called, all sorry to hear about Johnny’s death._

_But they weren’t affected like him._

_They didn’t wake up every morning, expecting Johnny to be there, smiling. They didn’t walk into the kitchen, hoping that he’d be cooking. They weren’t reminded of him every time a certain song came on, or when they passed a smiling couple, or when someone especially tall walked next to them on the street. They didn’t see his crooked smile, and how sometimes, especially near the end, when his happy-go-lucky mask would crack, and spill out his fears, staring at the ceiling, holding back tears. They didn’t know Johnny like Ten did. His death didn’t affect them like it affected Ten._

_How was Ten supposed to move on?_

He stares at the stars, and finds Mars once again. “You promised you would be here-"

"You said you wouldn't let go-"

"YOU PROMISED-"

"I HATE YOU, JOHNNY SUH-"

"I _HATE _YOU-"

"WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME?"

"WHY?!"

He screams into the darkness, the wind carrying his rage away.

He leans against the post, staring up at the sky. "I miss you."

“Why- oh God,  why  aren’t you here?”

"You promised me, Johnny. You aren't supposed to break a _promise_." His voice catches, and breaks.

He starts crying again, crying for Johnny and lost love and what could've been, and what they were.

His head hurts.

His tear ducts are dried out.

He feels like he can't cry anymore.

Like an empty cup.

Spilled.

_ Jump. _

Ten climbs onto the fence. 

Sits on the post. 

Looks down.

It’s a straight fall, into freezing black water. 

“I’m going to join you soon, you know.”

When he feels a hand on his shoulder, he just about jumps in right there.

“Don’t. He wouldn’t want you to.”

Ten whirls around, stares at the person illuminated by the full moon. He’s got the looks of angel, all symmetrical face and perfectly tousled hair, eyebrow slit and dark eyes.

_Death?_

But he's looking up at Ten with the feelings of a human, eyes that convey a sort of bitterness that soften as Ten looks at him.

_He understands._

“Who- what- who are you?”

"Lee. Lee Taeyong."

It’s funny, the way the world works.

**Author's Note:**

> *yeet skeet self delete*


End file.
